Hoaxes

Unfortunately, most reporters are extremely gullible when it comes to reporting gender issues, because they never question what women activists tell them. Apparently male reporters immediately go into a testosterone fog which makes them lose their ability to think, and female reporters simply side with the women's activists in order to be part of the sisterhood. That's why male and female reporters repeat some really ridiculous exaggerations in the areas of Domestic Violence, Rape and Sexual Harassment.

However, there are two major hoaxes that have had wide effects on public policy.

Lenore Walker's Super Bowl Hoax

In January, 1993, a group of women's activists, led by Lenore Walker, a Denver psychologist and author of The Battered Woman, announced that 40% more men beat up their wives on Super Bowl day than on other days. The credulous press ate it up; e.g., Michael Collier of the Oakland Tribune wrote that the Super Bowl causes "boyfriends, husbands and fathers" to "explode like mad linemen, leaving girlfriends, wives and children beaten." What reporter wouldn't be thrilled to spew out this kind of stuff?

The statistic was supposedly based on surveys and research, but the hoax was revealed when one Washington Post staff writer, Ken Ringle, actually had the temerity to check out the feminists' sources, and discovered that some researchers had been misquoted, and some statistics had been made up. In the end, it turns out that the hoax was total, and nothing special happens on Super Bowl Sunday, except that a football game is played. Unfortunately, the statistic is still quoted frequently, even though it's false and extremely offensive to men, and particularly offensive to football fans.

Incidentally, I've had similar experiences in my own online discussions with women's activists. Sometimes, someone posts distorted figures online, quoting somebody's research. I do some of my own fact checking, and on several occasions I've telephoned the quoted researcher or obtained the published results, and discovered, rarely to my surprise, that the distorted claims had no relationship to reality. For some reason, whenever I post the findings from my fact checking online, it never seems to make me very popular with these women's activists.

Lenore Weitzman's Child Support Hoax

Two out of three times, the person filing for divorce is the mother, with the father opposed. The reason so many women are filing for divorce, usually for very trivial reasons, is because of the enormous increase in child support payments that most states have mandated. Most mothers getting a divorce make the calculation that they can be free of the commitments of marriage by filing for divorce and then collecting lucrative child support payments, which they can spend on their own lifestyle in any way they want.

The reasons that so many states enacted these substantial child support increases is because of a hoax perpetrated by Lenore Weitzman, then an associate professor at Harvard University, in her 1985 book, The Divorce Revolution: The unexpected social and economic consequences for women and children in America.

Weitzman's principal conclusion was that, after a divorce, "on the average, divorced women and the minor children in their households experience a 73 percent decline in their standard of living in the first year after divorce. Their former husbands, in contrast, experience a 42 percent rise in their standard living."

Weitzman's conclusion resonated with credulous press and legislators who are willing to believe anything, no matter how silly, from feminist sources. Her conclusion was widely quoted, and it inspired huge increases in mandated child support payments in many states.

The problem is that the conclusion, and in fact, most of the book, was a hoax. Her conclusion was supposedly based on statistical analysis of survey data, but no one else who analyzed the same data could duplicate her results.

Researchers started calling immediately seeking clarification, but she stalled, prevaricated, and lied for ten years. Only in 1996 did she acknowledge that her conclusions were wrong.

She had made obvious computational errors, she had used obsolete methodologies, she had ignored tax issues, she had exaggerated expenses that the mother supposedly had to pay, and ignored major expenses that the father actually had to pay. In the end, her book was just a hack job by a hack feminist researcher.

What is the legacy of Weitzman's hoax?

When welfare entitlements rose substantially in the 70s, teen girls and young women moved massively to becoming pregnant in order to take advantage of these welfare payments. (A young girl frequently uses the term "liberation day" to refer to her 16th birthday, the first day that she can get a free apartment and welfare payments provided that she's unmarried and pregnant.)

This abuse of welfare was so massive that in America one out of three children is born out of wedlock. These children are much more likely than children in intact families to be abused or an abuse victim, to become teen parents, to be involved with drugs, and/or to be in the criminal justice system.

With welfare reform in the 90s, these welfare payments dried up, and these young women looked for another source of money for their lifestyles. Thanks to Lenore Weitzman's hoax and the big increase in child support payments, these girls have turned to young men to replace welfare.

Here is what one of them said:

"You men think that you're hunting us, but we're hunting you."

There are a number of women like her who go to bars and nightclubs to find men who make a good salary. They have no interest in having a relationship with these men, only to get pregnant and collect child support. Some of these young women collect two or child support checks each week. They add:

"We own you. You're a slave. You're going to pay us every single week for the next 20 years. We can have an outside agency [the Massachusetts Department of Revenue] collect the money for us and send it to us, and if you don't pay us, we can have you put into jail. And you'll do anything we say, because otherwise we won't let you see your child."

This is the legacy of Lenore Weitzman's hoax. She should be ashamed of herself, but I suspect that, wherever she is now, she's probably gloating.